Ah, the Playboy magazine collection. Foundation of troubled relationships everywhere. Close your eyes and imagine some couple you know. They'll have to be a troubled couple. Now imagine the better half of that couple saying, voice strident with righteous indignation, "Him and his goddamned playboys. I'm going to withold sex until he gets rid of them." Or imagine your girlfriend, catching you perusing idly through the college issue, trying to wade into Asa Baber's latest drivel, when suddenly, "You want me to look just like those women!" she shrieks like some Caspian Sea fishwife, bearing down on you for a good thrashing, and maybe hucking a frying pan or two at your head for good measure. Strike a chord somewhere, Chester?

And, of course, let us examine, in keen detail, the kind of man who reads Playboy. The ads would have you believe that the Playboy man is a smug, cleft-chinned, Armani-suit wearing secret agent with a really nice watch and a mean pair of fuschia Speedos who spends a lot of time cruising in Cancun, piloting ultralights, and smoking fine cigars. The fact that your average Playboy reader is far more likely to be guzzling Budweiser and spinning tire irons in his motorhuckles is a gruesome fact wholesomely and mercifully ommitted from the perfume-laden insert advertisments. Should truth-in-advertising verily become a law, the sight of many a perspiring, shiny-pated Mini Mart clerk and shirtless railroad dick paunching out in his Recline-O-Mite with a can of Iron City will grace these Playboy pages of ours, making it necessary for the reader, in the interest of his psychological well-being, to move on to the more attractive parts of the magazine, and reinforcing the old joke immortalized by popular belief and "Hee Haw", that no one reads the magazines for the articles.

At least, you can say to yourself, Playboy calls them Playmates. Playmate. It's such an innocuous word. Deceptively childlike, smacking of innocence that isn't there, implying a childish sense of "fun". It could be worse. The Penthouse people call their models "pets". Mmm-boy. Degrade-o-licious.

It's got to be rough working as a writer for Playboy. Talk about a venue not to get stuck in. How many cocktail parties must you defend yourself against raging feminists coming up to you with a handful of champagne, a headful of high dudgeon, and a story about skeletal models eating cotton balls soaked in honey and the perpetuation of the ultimate sexual stereotype as the anorexic, body-hairless fourteen year-old girl? Then you've got to drag out that old saw about the women of Playboy expressing their sexual freedom through their bodies, and the shame of the Puritanical sexual mores of the American populace... she snorts, obviously not believing a word, and goes off to talk smack to all her Unshorn Sisters of the Apocalypse friends (who all work for the New Temperance Movement), and you're left wondering where the next blackball is coming from. Don't lose that job, Junior, because slap that on a resume and your PC-ness just left with the last train. Just try getting hired with that face.

Let's face it. The models of Playboy themselves are fairly well preposterous, the high-tech glamour girls with their breasts the size of basketballs and "turn-ons: bubble baths, big red expensive cars; turn-offs: traffic, close-minded people". Even more preposterous is the idea that the Brylcreem bastards in the Giorgio suits are leafing through Playboy in the cushioned seats of their Cessnas. Yeah. Tell me that the man with the kind of money to buy the gear that Playboy regularly advertises leads a poor, lonely, sequestered existence. Start advertising body piercings, kegger supplies, and term-paper services, and then you're hitting your target demographic.